Itty-Bitty Satellites Could Carry Your Experiments to Space

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It looks like an alien balloon. Except that it flies at 17,500 mph in near-Earth orbit and can carry a science experiment—potentially your science experiment—for two months before it burns up in the atmosphere. And early next year, 20 of these ThumbSats will beam data back to a network of 50 listening stations all over the world.

Aerospace engineer Shaun Whitehead came up with the ThumbSat project because he wanted to help regular people send stuff into space. “We get slowed down by old-school ways of thinking,” he says. “I hope that ThumbSat accelerates progress in space, inspires everyone to look up.” His craft are so small that they fit into the nooks and crannies of commercial launchers, hitching a ride with bigger payloads and keeping costs down.

The people conducting the first experiments are a diverse group. Engineers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory hope to use a cluster of connected ThumbSats to study gravitational waves. Three teenage sisters from Tennessee who go by the moniker Chicks in Space want to orbit algae and sea monkey eggs. Artist Stefan G. Bucher will deploy magnetized fluids and shape-memory alloys.

Eventually a global network of volunteers, including a Boy Scout group in Wisconsin and a school in the Cook Islands, will monitor all the ThumbSat data. (Without receivers on those remote islands, there’d be a big gap in coverage out in the South Pacific.) Space is the place, and pretty soon anyone will be able to reach it.